Skin

  There was a pause. Nothing happened for a moment, then the body gave with a tearing sound as it unstuck itself from the boot liner and rolled sideways so that Misty’s face was resting against the lip of the rear bumper. Flea pushed her knees under her to stop her falling on to the ground. She took a few breaths.

  The back of Misty’s head was matted with blood and now Flea could see what had killed her. There it was: a massive blow to the left side of the head where it had come into contact with the roof of the car. She could see all the details of Misty’s ear where it had been torn away from the skull: she could see the folds and crevices and canals – a swift image of them being formed years ago, a dizzying slideshow of a baby taking shape: being born, growing, losing teeth, getting ankle socks and grazed knees. She saw first lipstick, first boyfriend, first heartbreak. She saw the drugs and the drink, the diets. She saw it as clearly as she could see her own past, and although she knew who Misty was, and that if they’d met in life they’d have had nothing to say to one another, something cold and lonely opened inside her.

  She turned her head sideways and breathed hard. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, clenching her teeth. ‘Stop it.’ She craned her neck and wiped the sweat off on her shoulder. She’d never lost it on a body recovery and she wasn’t going to now.

  ‘OK.’ She looked at Misty’s torn scalp again, at the thick blonde hair. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry about the way I’m dealing with this. Please believe that.’

  She paused for a second, as if Misty might reply. Then, grunting with the effort, she lowered the body slowly on to the sheeting. She was used to doing this with three other people to help, but Misty was light and rolled easily, her right arm dropping back down at her side so that her face was exposed. Flea stood, hands on her knees, breathing hard, and studied her for a while. Misty was so swollen that even her mother wouldn’t recognize her, let alone the tabloids and the fans. How long would it have taken for her to get like this lying next to a roadside? Longer than the four days she’d been in the car.

  She folded the plastic sheeting lengthwise over Misty’s face, giving it a neat pleat fold along the top, the ends into goosenecks secured with zip ties. With an effort, feeling the strain in her back, she carried the cocoon to the bath and settled it carefully among the ice.

  She paused for a second, looking down at Misty, at the smudged outline of a person. Already a faint fog was coming up from the ice, shrouding her, sending iced air past plastic, into skin, muscle and nerve.

  ‘I know right now there isn’t any God. But if I’m wrong and he is up there somewhere, then for Christ’s sake . . .’

  She pulled off her gloves, dropped them on the floor. She could feel the weight of everything trying to tug her down.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, let him watch over you, Misty. Let him watch over you.’

  14

  By the time Flea had showered, washed her hair and got dressed – black combats and the black dive-unit polo shirt – the moon was up. Out of the window a bank of clouds had crept over the top of Claverton Down and was marching slowly towards the house. One was the shape of a hand. Claws, extended, reaching down to trail its way through the garden, over the roof. She closed the window. Locked it.

  In the garage the smell was still there in spite of the floor fan. She scooped out the ice water with a saucepan, added more cubes and refilled the ice trays in the freezer. The Focus’s boot stood open, the inside stripped back to the moulded panels. Earlier she’d carved up the parcel shelf and the ripped-out boot liner using an electric handsaw. The remains were in a black bin bag against the door.

  It was easy to imagine what the garage would look like from the outside – new paper shields on the window and, suddenly, the lights on for hours at a time. The Oscar family would notice it. She switched off the overhead lights and found a torch, then used it to hunt for a while along the walls, searching through the remnants of her family’s life. Here was an old semi-drysuit her father had abandoned, neoprene flaking at the elbows and knees, there a weight belt, a collection of masks. Dad’s first great love had been diving the dangerous and most extreme places the planet had to offer. He’d infected the whole family with it.

  She pulled back a wheelbarrow that was leaning against the wall and found what she was looking for. An old container of engine oil, streaked and syrup-coloured with grass cuttings sticking to it. She picked it up, found an empty can at the other side of the garage, a length of rubber tube, gathered up the bin bag and carried it all out to the Clio.

  The clawed cloud was still lowering over the house. It hadn’t given in to rain yet. She turned the car out of the driveway and took the low road, down through the deserted residential streets at the foot of Solsbury Hill. Up the bypass, she found the tiny single-lane track that led up the side of Charmy Down Hill. The top was flat. In the war it had been used as a night-fighter station for Hurricanes to land. The control tower and the changes in the colour of the grass where the runways had been were still visible.

  She pulled the Clio on to the airfield, wedged it next to a wartime bunker so it was completely hidden by insect-heavy buddleia and elderberry, got out and stood for a moment, looking westwards at the underlit clouds closing down on the spires and crescents of Bath. It was strange here, to be able to see everything for miles around. She turned and looked at the deserted airfield, at the clumps of waist-high grass and weed, the disused buildings, the piles of tyres and rusting farm machinery. There wasn’t a soul up here – not even a bird, a fox or a cat. It was like crossing into a dead world.

  One a.m. It had to be done now. She threw open the boot, pulled out the bin bag containing the boot liner and the chopped-up parcel shelf, threw it on to the ground and went to get the can of oil. With her feet planted on either side of the bag, she opened the can and let the oil gloop in long loops down on to it until it was covered. She gathered up the length of tube from the boot, unscrewed the petrol cap, shoved one end of the tube down into the tank and the other into the empty can. Pinching her nose, using her tongue as a splashguard she closed her lips over the tube and sucked hard, hard, until the oily petrol foamed up from the tank. Quickly she pulled back, thrusting the pipe down into the can and holding it there while the petrol drained.

  Keeping her feet spaced and well back to stop them being splashed, she drizzled the petrol over the bin bag. When it was drenched she screwed the cap on the can, put it in the Clio boot with the oil can, replaced the petrol cap and locked the car. There was a box of matches in the bottom pocket of her work combats. She struck one, dropped it into the bin bag and stepped back. The petrol caught instantly, with a blue woomp, burning off in a second and leaving a baby flame in the centre – a lone curl of black smoke rising testingly into the air. She walked backwards a hundred paces and stopped next to the car to watch the dark shape of the bag let off a tendril of smoke and oily air, then bloom and thicken into flame. Sure now that it wasn’t going to go out she pulled the phone from her pocket and dialled Thom.

  The phone rang and rang, then clicked into answerphone. She dialled the home number, watching the incandescence of the fire lighting the undersides of the grass and trees around. When the home phone went to answerphone she dialled his mobile again. This time it rang four times. Then there was a muffled click and the sound of him breathing.

  ‘Thom?’

  Silence. She put an elbow on the roof of the Clio. ‘Speak to me. Are you there?’

  Another beat of silence. Then his voice, thick and nasal, as if he’d been crying. ‘Yeah, I’m here. It’s really late.’

  ‘And Mandy? Is she still—’

  ‘She’s asleep. I don’t want to wake her up.’

  ‘OK. Get in your car and meet me somewhere. Saltford. At the pub on the river.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve got to show me where it happened.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I’m serious. I don’t.’

  ‘
Then we’re going to drive until you do remember. I’ll see you in half an hour.’

  ‘No!’ he hissed.

  She pressed a finger into the bridge of her nose. ‘Look, if we don’t deal with this now it’s going to get worse and worse. It’ll finish us both.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘It happened in Farleigh Park, didn’t it? Somewhere near the rehab place?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, it must have. She can’t have walked far.’

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. She pushed herself away from the car and stood with her hand in the small of her back above her hip, where her body armour sometimes gave her gyp. ‘Thom, this isn’t going to go away – whatever you think or hope it’s going to come out somehow. And if you leave it, and if they find out you shovelled her up and put her in the sodding boot of the—’ Her voice was rising, speeding. ‘Oh, God help you, you’ll be up in Long Lartin before you know it. They’ll know your sister’s a cop. And even if you got vulnerable status that would just put you in with the IPPs.’

  ‘The IPPs? What’re they?’

  ‘The ones they keep in for public protection – the nonces, the sex offenders, the real nutters. Not good. Not good at all. Now get in the car and meet me.’

  ‘But Mandy’ll know. She’ll find out. She suspects anyway. Just from the way you spoke to her she knows something’s up.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell her eventually.’

  ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’

  ‘Then I’ll do it. Go and wake her up. Give her the phone.’

  ‘No! No, please. Please!’

  ‘Thom! Just wise up, will you? Just wise up.’

  There was a long silence. Embers and black plastic floated into the air. Beyond them the moon, hot and white, glowed faintly through the clouds. Then Thom spoke, his voice thick. Sullen. ‘OK. OK – I’ll do it. I’ll tell her.’

  She breathed out. ‘Good. You do that. And call me when you have.’

  15

  The moon comes up fast in Somerset: racing across the lowlands, up the sides of the Mendips, into the Quantocks. It picks out the glittering windows of the cities in the far north of the county, creeps into the car in the mortuary car park where Jack Caffery plugs the key into the ignition. It finds Flea Marley in the north-east, standing on the blade of a hill, watching smoke rise. And ten miles to the east of her, in a quite different setting, it lingers on a lonely grey house. A house set back from a deserted lane, surrounded by fallow farmland, barns and outhouses and a disused swimming-pool. The moonlight fingers the windows of the single-storey extension. It tries but can’t reach past the breezeblocks into the specially adapted room.

  Inside, the light is a different colour. Here there is only an unearthly blue glow, emanating from seven specialized refrigerator units, all of which have their doors wide open to reveal their contents: stack after stack of carefully inventoried containers, each filled to the brim with formalin.

  The man is in the middle of the room on the floor. He is perfectly naked and sits with his legs crossed, almost in a yogic pose, letting the calming light from the units bathe him. He will never see a woman’s skin pegged out on his workbench. He understands this. Has understood it for years. That belongs to the realms of fantasy.

  But his collection . . . His collection is his reality. It started as a small concession to the fantasy, but it has grown above and beyond that. It is more, much more. It is his life’s work. His reason to keep breathing. He’ll protect it at any cost. He’ll do anything, even kill.

  He has a flash – a sudden photographic image of a face on a hospital trolley. The trolley is being wheeled away under fluorescent strip-lights. The patient is anaesthetized but as the gurney disappears something happens – something the hospital porters on either side don’t notice. The patient’s head tilts back, it twists a little and suddenly, unseen by anyone, her eyes fly open. She is awake. Awake and alert and can see everything. Everything.

  He puts his face in his hands and concentrates.

  ‘Sssh.’ His voice is soft. A whisper. As if he’s soothing a child. ‘Sssssh. It’s OK. OK now.’

  Things have gone wrong, but he’s set them right. It’s all behind him. All he has to do is keep calm and trust himself.

  ‘Sssssssh . . .’

  He sits like this a little longer.

  Then, irritably, he gets up. He goes around the room slamming the refrigerator doors.

  He hates this life. He hates it.

  16

  The next morning a low-pressure front nosed in from the Atlantic. Clouds hugged the Mendips, rain fell hard in the cities, flooded the storm drains. Traffic threw up dirty spray on the motorways. At quarry number two, almost at the end of the Elf’s Grotto quarries, no light was getting down into the water – it felt as if dusk had come early. Flea had to take the Salvo divelight down with her into the water.

  ‘What is it about you, Sarge?’ Wellard’s voice was loud in her ear. ‘You’ve got another audience. Traffic guys again. Even a couple of CID, I think.’

  She established her jackstay line, got her heading and began to swim.

  ‘I think they fancy you, Sarge. Except no. Probably not you. Me. My eyes are prettier.’

  ‘Give the line a tug.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Give the fucking line a tug.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Wellard pulled the umbilical hurriedly. The line strained at her chest. ‘Clear?’

  ‘Clear.’

  A pause. Then, ‘Bit hormonal again, are we, Sarge?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me. I’m concentrating.’

  Thom still hadn’t called. She’d been up half the night waiting and now she was pissed off. Seriously, seriously pissed off. She was wondering how long she should leave it before she gave up. Threw him to the lions.

  ‘Sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Course I’m sure. Now be quiet and give me another bar.’

  This was her first time in the water since her accident with the air line and the Health and Safety Executive would self-combust if they knew how many hours’ sleep she was doing this on. She kept thinking of the hallucination. This quarry was at the end of the horseshoe and only a quarter of a mile from number eight where she’d narked and nearly drowned. Maybe there were connecting tunnels out here. Old air shafts that were flooded now and had things moving through them.

  Bollocks. All bollocks. Narcosis. She’d been narked. That was all. She’d been down at fifty metres. No one could swim at fifty metres.

  ‘Sure you’re OK, Sarge?’

  ‘Christ, Wellard. Yes.’

  ‘Nothing worrying you?’

  ‘No. I’m just looking forward to the pleasure of seeing who this guy is. That’s all. Pulling his body out. Now, will you shut it?’

  The job had come in first thing this morning. Three hours ago, at school drop-off time, a Lexus had been carjacked from a small town in north Somerset. A nine-year-old schoolgirl, in a tunic and a grey blazer because it was a top-drawer private school, was sitting in the back. The jacker had driven her for twenty miles, talking to her all the way, before stopping in Wells and ordering her to get out on the roadside, where she’d stood, crying and shaking, for ten minutes, watching the cars go by on their way to work, until a minicab driver had thought to stop. Then the jacker had driven the car another five miles over to the Elf’s Grotto cave system where he’d run the Lexus off the road through a disused car-repair garage and straight into quarry number two.

  It was a similar MO to another carjacking a year or so ago. That time the victim had been a six-year-old girl. In Flea’s opinion it was the same guy. In her opinion he wasn’t a carjacker at all but a paedophile. If the jacker today was the same person he wouldn’t be the first paedophile to make a try at acting out his fantasies, failed and committed suicide. She hoped he’d kept his windows shut and that they hadn’t smashed when he’d entered the water. She hoped he’d taken a while to die.

  She got to
the end of the first twenty-metre section out into the quarry and turned, wishing it was night-time. Cars were a cinch at night-time – the headlights often stayed on, even in the water, but the jacker’s lights probably hadn’t been on, in spite of the rain. The team usually looked for ‘primary indicators’ before they dived, tips as to where the car had gone in, but today there weren’t any: no oil floating on the surface or scuffmarks on the edges. Kind of strange. So they’d had to assume the Lexus had come in on the only place leading out of the car park – the slip road on the west side.

  She picked up the jackstay weight – the marker they used to delineate their search pattern – and dropped it. Harder than necessary.

  ‘Hey, Sarge? Let’s hope it is a body you pull out.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Hope it’s not someone wanting a fight with you. You know, freak air pockets ’n’ stuff.’

  ‘Jesus, Wellard, you been standing too near your car exhaust again? Just can it, will you?’

  The team had been at the office when the call came and they had got to the quarry in under an hour and a half. But the witness who’d seen the Lexus go in didn’t have a mobile. He’d driven five miles down the road to a payphone so at least two hours had gone by. No. No chance the bastard was still alive.

  She finned on, not looking over her shoulder. She didn’t think about or picture the yards and yards of dark water back there, but kept her attention focused forward to where the ground dipped away into pitch darkness. A little silt kicked up from the floor. A shape emerged from the darkness below. She realized she was looking at a boat, moss-covered and very old, something to ask the quarry company about. She checked inside. It was empty and thick with weed. Maybe they’d left it as a dive attraction. She put her hand on it and used it to pull herself along, following the compass.